Hanna Brooks Olsen

Privacy has become a major subject of conversation lately. Facebook has captured your data, with the help of your friends, and is using it to sell you things. Every website and app has updated their privacy settings to make consumers feel safer about sharing their locations, their relationships and their movement. It lends a sense of security to know that our privacy is being handled with care because, we believe, we deserve privacy. We are entitled to it.

Glenn Walker has been all over the place — in his life and as a Real Change vendor. He’s lived in Denver, New York and Chicago, but he’s been at home in Seattle for years. Selling papers, he gets around, too: Issaquah, Bellevue and Bainbridge Island are all on his regular route.

The day he was paired with me — sorry, Glenn — he was downtown, definitely not his favorite spot.

The noise of the traffic drowns out his secret weapon: A small speaker he uses to play KING FM 98.1, the classical music station.

Amazon’s new grocery store has economists once again pondering a future where humans are replaced by automated systems — first they came for the pump jocks, then the courtesy clerks. What’s next, the cabbies? But there are other reasons to be concerned about the human-less, cashless future that retail giants seem to be building.

Sexual harassment, assault and gender-based violence have dominated the headlines this year. And though most of the stories have been centered around the stories of actors, athletes, pundits, lawmakers and other people with faces and names you know, violence is not the sole purview of the wealthy. Far from it.

For women, trans folks and nonbinary individuals, it’s a fact of life and a part of a larger cycle of poverty, homelessness and trauma.

Years ago in a job interview with a local paper, I suggested that they consider covering homelessness with more depth — specifically, in a way that would be beneficial to people living outside. The paper was one of the remaining free sources of information — The Seattle Times had recently adopted a paywall — and one that was accessible not just to the general population but to the very population who needed the information the most.

The ongoing cleanups of unsanctioned encampments have been a keystone campaign issue, yet no one seems to know how much they cost or what they achieve

The city of Seattle knows how much things cost. Just page through the city’s Open Data site, a public website that publishes public data, including expenditures. You can find the line-item for festivals in 2013 ($1,481,593), the going rate of a 2002 Dodge Neon fleet vehicle at auction ($3,650), or the percentage of the public health budget that’s spent on asthma awareness and prevention (just over 1 percent).

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to the ongoing “cleanups” of the Seattle area’s many unsanctioned encampments. We don’t know how many there are. We don’t know how much tax money it costs to execute them. And we don’t know what, exactly, they’re cleaning up.

In September, newly appointed Mayor Tim Burgess proposed the Seattle Retirement Savings Plan, which would create the first-ever portable retirement plan run by a city.

Burgess said too many workers are aging with no savings, and that Social Security alone is not enough to live on, particularly in a city as expensive as Seattle. During his remarks, he noted that “40 percent of our workers have no access to a workplace retirement savings plan.”

The Seattle mayoral race has been a whirlwind of buzzwords and campaign stops, of profiles and photo ops. It can be tough to determine which candidates really align with your values. To get an idea of what voters care about — or at least what candidates think that voters care about — just look at the fliers that have appeared in your mailbox.

The top-line issue on most campaign sites and collateral? Homelessness. And yet, few of the candidates appear particularly interested in speaking directly to folks living outside — who are, indeed, constituents.

Before Amazon was investing in housing for homeless folks in South Lake Union, the tech giant had another idea to help. In December of 2015, the company approached the YWCA, looking to hire some people who were experiencing homelessness. It seemed like an exciting proposal. After all, a job is the ticket out, right?